The Sims 4 To Be The Fourth Sims Game?

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EA’s recently-announced The Sims 4 may in fact be a new Sims game, sources have revealed to RPS.

The source, who did not wished to be named but who purports to have strong ties to the press release-reading community, claimed exclusively to this website that The Sims 4 is in fact the fourth in the Sims series.
While EA has of yet only revealed that The Sims 4 will be released in 2014, our source has elaborated that the game will be available next year.

“EA are trying hard to keep this from going public,” said the source, “but The Sims 4 is the sequel to The Sims 3.” RPS has taken steps to verify the identity of this source, and as such is currently convinced that The Sims 4 is indeed a new Sims game.

When our source was quizzed for more on EA’s statement that The Sims 4 would include an offline singleplayer mode, gunshots were heard, then the line went dead.

Ugh, I didn’t know the Sims Store was a thing. :( Should have known better.

Welp, with the low hanging fruit gone it’ll be interesting to see what extra tricks EA have to milk the cash cow with this iteration. Maybe they’ll let you resurrect your old sims for a small (not small) cash fee.

Actually this would be cool as an optional feature. The Sims can be fun for a while but really loses all challenge and interest for me after the first few hours of playing because of the dumb-as-bricks AI and fact that after a while the game just becomes about accumulating yet more stuff when you already have everything you could conceivably use.

Implemented properly, this is one game I can see the idea of random players being able to muck around in your neighborhood and mess up your plans adding significant interest to. Of course, this is EA we’re talking about so they’d probably fuck it up horribly.

“Massively Singleplayer” is how Will Wright described Spore – your creatures and templates are saved to the cloud and used to populate other single player games’ content. I wished so much that this feature would be incorporated into Sims 3 but alas they just gave us an item store.

People may forget but this feature of Spore was extremely innovative in this way.

Having witnessed the bug-fest that is the World Adventure expansion first and second hand, I concur and would go as far as saying that EA doesn’t give much about QAing their Money Printing Licensesexperience enhancing expansions.

You’ll be able to play offline, but your Sim will then suffer from loneliness. Also, as power, water, shop items and everything else is imported from your online neighbours, he/she will be able to survive offline for at most 3 minutes, before dying in an unlighted home, without food or water.

When you go online again, your house and your Sim will be corrupted, forcing you to start from the beginning, but at least you can look at all the sparkling items from various free DLCs, such as electric cars that don’t need power, incredibly healthy Coca Cola in your fridge and playing away on your Xbox 720 for which your Sim will need his own Xbox Live Gold account, which is real, but gets discounted 25%. You can’t use it with a real Xbox after all; it would be ripping the customers off if you had to pay full price.
Oh, and it will give you a discount of 5% on the inevitable two dozen “expansion packs” that either cost as much as a full game if you want something remotely interesting or “only” half of that if they give you exciting things like a couple of new virtual clothes or 3 new carpets for your virtual house.

Forgive my rant. I like the Sims games actually, but the ridiculous expansion pack price scheme just drives me up the wall.

Yeah, but at least you were able to decide yourself how exactly they die, how long they suffer and when to do it. Internet crapping out, killing your Sim before your Ultimate Plan Of Infinite Torture And Death is completed – imagine the horror!

I liked The Sims franchise for a while, but after trying TS3 out for a while I just realized I wasn’t controlling these people, they were controlling me. Player, do this please. Clean up this please, etc. Just felt more like a chore than fun gameplay. The designing of houses was in the end the most fun I had in the game.

If someone else ever tries a Sims-like game, I’d be more interested in them turning it into a god game. Instead of controlling their actions, you only control their environment. These powers you then use to make everyone happy and help achieve everyone’s life goals. It’d be easy at first, but by the time you’re handling an entire street all those wants and needs start to conflict, adding the challenge.

I quite honestly enjoyed playing the original Sims but I tried Sims 2 back in the day and even a little bit of Sims 3 (though I admitted I pirated that one to try it out – uninstalled an hour later) and none of them just have that appeal the original one did.

I still go back and play the original one from time to time. It’s more ridiculous and over the top in my opinion and that makes for a better GAME in my opinion. Then in Sims 2 they introduced those life goals and your Sim can now age and die and all other kinds of “realistic” endeavors that just made the game less of a game and more of a chore.

Also lets to disable the Celebrity system, every Supernatural (witches, vampires, faeries, etc) type (except zombies), lets you set the seasons, lets you set the lunar cycle (which only effects when zombies will spawn, so disabling this disables zombies) and some other stuff.

Sweet jesus, for her sake I hope this one runs better. With all her expansions and mods installed it takes literally about 15 minutes to load the game, and her PC is pretty solid. I couldn’t believe it the first time she showed me and said it always took that long.

Its because the game have to load each hairpiece, chair etc. you have in your downloads folder individually. You can merge these items into one big file with custom programs, and then it becomes much faster. But yeah, the Sims series is notorious for beeing unoptimized and so full of bugs its unplayable without dedicated communities to make unofficial bugfixes.

Guess I’ll out myself as a Sims 3 lover, though I will say I only acquire expansion packs when they go on Steam sale and very rarely get stuff from the store with my own money; usually it’s either a free weekend for a couple of items, or I’ve somehow otherwise acquired/been gifted the store currency.

I’ve had great fun in every aspect of the base game and expansions so…I dunno, I feel I got my money’s worth.

That said, won’t be touching Sims 4 until well after release, if at all, because EA is EA and it’ll be better to see how things shake out and develop than to jump in without looking.

Must say I like the redefined art style of the Staring Eyes in the teaser, though.

EDIT: My actual game loading time takes less time than the annoying unskippable intro splashes so and I’ve never had a problem with game slowdown over extended play sessions, either.

That said, I do get random freezes sometimes. This seems independent of play length.

So…yea, more stability for TS4, please. Maybe support modding so the community can fix it ourselves and share, hmmm?

It’s not particularly rare for copyright owners to preemptively buy domain names related to their brand. Even if they don’t intend to use it (or won’t use it for ten whole years) they snap it up so they won’t have to buy it from somebody else.

As long as it allows people to have personal life fantasies, it will sell – even without offline mode or whatever.

Like these 5 girls between the age 16 and 18 talking at the store about how they loved The Sims (2 or 3), because they could get their character pregnant with almost anyone (once you know the game mechanics), use an item (micro-transaction or expansion pack, can’t remember – consumables of course) to get twins/triplets, give birth, then let the social worker character take them away rather rapidly (who wants to take of a whiny, noisy, little baby… when you could get pregnant again ! and again ! and again…).

I have more troubling examples, but I think the one above is the most representative of what makes The Sims such a commercial success.

That’s why (in my opinion) The Sims always sits at the top 10 of sales charts and is not just a “make your own story / social experiment” niche game: for most of its users (not all, hopefully) it’s a medication, a therapeutic software, that helps them deal with life’s frustration (about wealth, fame, social success, professional success, family, friendship, love, sexuality, fertility, childbirth, etc).

That’s the main reason why we shouldn’t have any hate towards its users, even if their addiction and purchasing habits makes publishers like EA think they can commercially abuse their userbase at no cost and without any limits – most of these users are not in a position of making reasonable choices: The Sims is affecting their most intimate, deepest complexes, concerns, sufferings – most of them are more victims of EA than guilty of blindly buying anything with The Sims written on it.

Disclaimers:
* Not every The Sims users are using The Sims as a psychological medication.
* Not every The Sims users are blindly buying anything with The Sims written on it.
* Some The Sims users shared very interesting and entertaining experiences they got from The Sims games.
* The Sims games can provide very interesting and entertaining gameplay.
* Something The Sims doesn’t teach you (and most people won’t read because it’s easier to jump the gun and not read everything): do not cook an egg (unless properly scrambled) in the microwave, the outer layer of the yellow yolk could solidify while the inner part boil, exposing you to an explosion (resulting in unpleasant facial burn) when the solidified layer is broken (intentionally or not).
* The Sims games are not solely responsible of Electronics Arts commercial abuses and overall behaviour in the last 15 years.

It amazes me is how EA will release even their major cash cows in such awful shape. You’d think they’d be a little more likely to lavish some attention on something like the Sims series, rather than poot it forth so undigested. I guess, like Bethesda, they count on their fanbase to do their work for them. Or just slurp it up, as is….